When relevant_rule_34 makes a comment that literally makes me shut my computer, sit down, and think about what I'm doing with my life, gets nominated for commenter of the year for it, and gets beaten out by HELLO FRIEND, WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE FLAVOR OF ICE CREAM???, I wonder if I actually do like this site, or if I'm just visiting it out of habit now.

I don't have any statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if a vast majority of redditers rarely, if ever, comment on anything. I know I didn't even have an account for the first year or so of browsing reddit - never saw the need.

He won out over RobotRollCall - the most eloquent, thoughtful explainer of science this site has ever seen. RRC could and should have been a celebrity with that amount of talent and instead chose to share it with strangers on a website. He or she actually changed the way that I look at the universe which is more than I can say even about my dear friends.

I have nothing against PACG; I like him and he's, well, a nice guy and a very active moderator with a novelty account. But it's low effort content. Easy to create, easy to digest. Robotrollcall is high effort content, which is harder to get a large audience to appreciate.

tl;dr: Reddit's no longer a tech/science community. It is just a community and with that comes both good and bad things.

Also, everything in this thread is forced lowercase. You tricky Admins.

I do like PACG, but I see where you're coming from and I agree it's sort of disappointing.

I just hope he doesn't beat out the other folks for All Around Reddit Hero, because PACG beating out people who've done big charity work, etc is as much of if not more of a sign that Reddit's user base only cares about memes and lulz.

Full disclosure: I'm a "hero" nominee, but I don't feel I have any likelihood of winning (nor do i feel I deserve it) over people who raised tons of money to save a life or to help make lives better, etc...

Okay, let's try and look at this objectively. I know we all love making fun of The Sun and its readers, but it really doesn't surprise me that East Side Mario won.

Consider the following. The actual "best" Italian restaurant is probably small and more on the expensive end of the pricing spectrum. Thus, fewer people have tried the food there or probably even heard of it. Let's say that out of the people that have eaten at this restaurant, 100% of them will vote for it for the best Italian restaurant title.

Now, consider ESM's. Let's say that 1% of the people who have eaten there will truly think it's the best Italian restaurant, (regardless of whether they just don't know better or they really, really like the food for whatever reason)

Working out the math, this means that if ESM's has 100 times as many customers as the actual best restaurant, they'd be tied. And I would not doubt at all that ESM probably has many, many more than 100 times more customers than the small, expensive, amazingly delicious Italian place.

So, by votes, ESM's wins simply because they have more exposure. It's the "lowest common denominator" so to speak of Italian restaurants.

In fact, we can see similar voting patterns on Reddit too. Mediocre posts that the majority of users will enjoy a little are a lot more successful than excellent posts that only a handful of users will enjoy a lot.

And that, I think, is a pretty good summary of what happened here. RobotRollCall made some great posts, but she made almost all of them in /r/AskScience (Little Italy), they were long and took effort to read (expensive), they answered specific questions (niche), and she disappeared for the last four months out of the year. And PACG is all over the place, in almost every subreddit, saying things that mostly everybody can agree with, and he's a highly visible mod in one of the most popular subreddits, he's got a shtick that's immediately accessible and good for a chuckle the first time you see it, and so on and so forth. PACG has exposure, RRC doesn't. Your success in this kind of poll is going to be something like Quality * Exposure. If you've got enough exposure, you don't need much quality at all. It's like, marketing or some shit.

So, it's not so much a matter of the decline of reddit as much as it's just, how these things are.

A gal who explained a lot of physics in /r/askscience from its early days to about 5 months ago. Her comments were well-written, clear, and without a lot of bullshit. She could be a bit of a prick, to be honest, but I imagine explaining black holes a million times would eventually cause that.

Somewhat. Part of the problem is that RRC's perspective on the universe and quantum theory left her in a position where she had very absolutist views on things.

Imagine being on a board where you are the resident expert on evolution, and every other question is "But what if a whale and a cocker spaniel had a baby - would it evolve faster than a monkey that lived a thousand years?" You want to help, but there are so many things wrong with that statement you don't know where to start. And when you open with "Well, first of all, a whale and a cocker spaniel couldn't procreate" you get hammered with "don't be a such a closed-minded jerk. Let's just say they could..."

I think that's what life was like for RRC on /r/askscience every time someone asked a question about going "through" a black hole or traveling faster than light.

Here's a theory I've been thinking about recently...PHOY and PACG are the same person. Style of comments are actually very similar, just minus the caps. PHOY has even stated he was going to try out a new username...

And the strangest part is that actually works to reverse the downvotes, along with things like: "You got me this time, good sir." I mean it's one thing to ignore the parent novelty, but another to scroll through (or collapse) a hundred child comments congratulating and dog piling.

although congratulatory comments aren't as bad as the ones that have to show that they got the joke. you know, the ones that say 'hey wait you're being polite in all caps... sees username ohhhhh'. Like, why do you feel the need to show off that you understood it?

I dislike most novelty account because most of them just show up with nothing to say, just a username somehow relevant to the thread and redditors get them to the top thinking that's funny while good discussion and actual information don't get enough attention or get burried.

But I'll admit some novelty are sometimes creative, interesting or entertaining. However this is NOT the case of polite_allcaps_guy, his gimmick is just typing in friendly manner with upper case and people will take him to the top every freakin time and if he show up in a discussion it will be ruined because the next response will just be a variant of "omg ur so polite I luv u".

Helpful_Table_Maker is actually a really useful novelty account, since s/he consolidates as many questions as possible from AMAs and puts them into a uniform table, saving me time for having to find good questions in the thread.

I was just thinking the other day how annoying it is when the second or third top-rated comment in every thread I go to will be P_A_G saying something like, "WAY TO DO THE RIGHT THING, MODERATORS" (800 points).

Exactly, practically all he does is make completely unremarkable comments, in caps, and add something like ", FRIEND" on the end. And somehow gets massively upvoted almost every time. I just don't get it.

I kind of thought it was funny at first. But then there just became such a huge circlejerk around him. He rarely does anything out of the ordinary other then throw in a few 'friend' and 'pal' and reddit, with dick already in hand, just starts stroking. At least award someone who has to out in some type of effort.

Nothing against him, I like him as a poster and as a redditor, I just don't think he's the right guy to represent us as 'best commenter'.

I guess I can't complain, I didn't vote (I didn't even know we were voting) and, like IRL, voting is almost always based on popularity, and not merit.

So, congrats to you polite_allcaps_guy. You're a good guy and clearly your comments fit what the majority defines as 'best'; even if haters (like me) don't appreciate or like what that says about the majority of our community.

That said: majority of our community, please either respond, or anonymously disapprove of a different opinion by downvoting, which is exactly what the downvote function is for. Though I certainly think I'm adding to the discussion whether you agree with me or not.

Pathetic. A guy wins this award for fucking being polite and making it a gimmick? Do the idiots who voted for him realize how much they've lowered the bar here? No wonder people don't bother posting insightful and thought out replies anymore in this place. It's obviously going to get overlooked for shit like this. Turning these novelty accounts into reddit-celebrities is just adding insult to injury as well.

I remember how I used to look forward to these awards. After this years horrible selections, I don't think I ever want to even vote in these. Fuck, in retrospect, I think we should do away with these awards. They're fast becoming meaningless in the face of Reddits ever growing popularity.

not just a gimmick, his 'fame' meant he could go into interesting AMAs, say stupid shit like 'hurr whut's your favourite ice cream do you like ghosts what's your favourite cloud' and get upvoted right to the top. i guess the awards just represent reddit, a place that now values their stupid stupid in-jokes and uninteresting joke comments over decent content.

To be honest with you, you're way over reacting. He won a FUCKING INTERNET AWARD. He doesn't even win a trophy or anything. In what way will him winning affect your browsing of reddit? Every website has some shitty content mixed in, it doesnt matter.

Mroglolblo shits all over this guy. I've never really liked POLITE_ALL_CAPS_GUY very much anyway. He was charming at first, but that got old fast. Words don't do Mroglolblo justice, just read his comment history.

Horrid decision. He contributed nothing good to the community at all. His only purpose was to derail the conversation, and he doesn't even do it humorously. His posts also make my eyes hurt. I find it somewhat hard to believe that Reddit would vote this guy to the top, but I guess the times are a-changin', and not in a good way.

Fun fact: When I was modding at /r/gameswap, All caps guy messaged the mods saying that he had created another game swapping subreddit and asking if we wanted to start supporting it.

He wouldn't even break character in a private mod-to-mod message, which made for a rather infuriating conversation since his mannerisms were exactly like he comments in his regular stuff: all caps and overly polite to a point of annoyance

There is obviously a lot of vitriol over something which is actually really ridiculously pointless at the end of the day, but I still agree he didn't deserve it. He was just a normal commenter who typed in capital letters and was polite to people. That doesn't warrant 'commenter of the year' in my opinion.

Every now and then it's obnoxious to see you upvoted because you're you and not because your comment is particularly important, but for the most part you're at least engaging in the comments and not just drooling into the wind like P_A_G